Andrei SymonenkoCorrespondent SportAll materialsOn Sunday, the World Championships in Athletics ended in Eugene, USA. The Russians were not allowed to participate, so our best athletes continue to fight for the prizes of their own multi-stage championship — the Queen of Russian Sports series. And what would the Russian team have achieved if they had received admission to the world championship and American visas (all Russians have had problems with this for a long time)? It’s worth making a reservation right away — correspondence comparisons in athletics are not entirely correct. Any athlete will tell you that a couple of extra tenths of a second helps to lose, and simple human adrenaline can add meters or centimeters. When you perform at home with a maximum of a hundred half-asleep spectators and without strong opponents, there are not very many of them. In a crowded arena of many thousands in the same sector or on the same track with the best on the planet, it increases. But even without the adrenaline correction, the silver medalist of the Tokyo Olympics Anzhelika Sidorova would have won the world championship in pole vault if she had made her attempt at 4, 86 meters not in Moscow on July 19, but two days earlier in Eugene. There, Katie Nujotte jumped to 4.85 and took the gold, which, it turns out, she did not deserve. With Sidorova in the sector, the result could have been completely different. In the 110 meters hurdles, American Grant Holloway won the world championship with a result of 13.03 seconds, and this is certainly a fast time. Sergey Shubenkov has not yet run like this this season (his summer 2022 record is 13.27). But — this does not mean at all that the Russian would not have taken the fifth medal of the world championship from Eugene. Firstly, Shubenkov ran out of 13 seconds, secondly, here is just the case when a face-to-face meeting adds agility, thirdly, Sergey is a great master of performances in tournaments where you need to decompose forces into three stages (run, semi-final and the final).
"The hurdles ran great, but not supernatural, and by the end of the final there were only five people left, so it could well be my sixth world championship in my career and my fifth in a row with a medal", — wrote Shubenkov in his Telegram channel.